ryv's blog

Over the last few days I've experienced a fair bit of back pain. A dull ache that spirals up to a sharp pain in the area between my waist line and shoulder blades. Not a lot of fun to cope with. Between the 2 hours of sleep a night and the rush, bustle and general unpleasantness of the holiday season, I'm starting to get a bit cranky. I think it's more the stress of this time of year than an actual injury of any type - although I do have to stoop over or bend when I do a lot of household stuff (which I've actually been doing). Coming back to the stress of Christmas though... I've been downtown a bit and the behaviour of people at this time of year is appalling. Of course, we all hear the wonderful Christmas stories from the media - marking this the one time of year they'll actual cover something good, but we don't get the unpleasant underbelly of Christmas coming to the fore. For example, as everyone rushes to get stuff for people, their driving habits worse

Each day I read quite a few articles on the net about various things. This one here: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/12/16/telecoms/index.html is referring to the eavesdropping the US government perpetrates on it's citizens and the desire of many of the piss weak pollies to allow the corporations, and by extension themselves, off without even a slap on the wrist. How the fuck does this support the people they are supposed to represent? In Australia the new Labour government are starting to bring in rules to prohibit various types of lobbying that involve an exchange of funds of any type. Why does the Government not take away the requirement to have any need for outside money in the race for the top spot? I'd love to see this happen in the US, where it appears the more money you have, the more likely you are to reach the Presidency. Now I'm not a fan of Kevin Rudd, the current Australian PM, but I'll give him a chance. I thought John Howard did alright - alt

I should have noted this some time ago. I was pretty pissed off when I stuffed up and paid for something I really didn't want on eBay - a CD of stuff for Nokia phones. At any rate, I resolved to make the best of it and see what came out of it all. Good news! eBay emailed me saying the seller's account had been suspended. I waited the requisite number of days and then emailed them indicating I had not received the goods. Surprisingly swiftly the money was returned and all was good. That'll learn that no good seller. It was also a good lesson for your's truly - pay attention to what you are bidding on!

I had attempted to write each day for December, but it's really not working out. When I want to write is generally when I'm trying to work and the great ideas I have are often swamped by the complexities of my tasks here at the office. Plus, I'm just finding it damn hard to write something interesting! And this led me to an ongoing thought stream I've had and that I pondered in some depth yesterday. You see, yesterday I watched the movie "The World's Fastest Indian" with Anthony Hopkins in it. Basically, the movie is about a Kiwi fellow by the name of Burt Munro who wants his 1920 model Indian motorcycle to be the fastest of its type in the world. He was focussed on his goal, lived, ate and breathed it and eventually it came to fruition. That passion, that burning desire to achieve a single goal - I don't have that. Nope, no passion for anything in particular. Even the things I really like doing, if I couldn't do them any more I'd miss them but

Over the course of the weekend I watched the entire (short) season of Firefly and then the movie Serenity. I cannot for the life of me understand why Firefly was cancelled. The characters were awesome, the environment they were set in was great and there was so much scope for different stories. I love watching it. Possibly the thing I like most about Firefly is the characters and how there seems to be a nice balance amongst them. No single character takes all the limelight, although Malcolm Reynolds is fairly central to most of it, he is not the focus. Joss Whedon and Tim Minear have done a fantastic job of writing the series and the movie. No wonder it has such a following. It raised another point that I've been pondering a little bit. The people we admire most have qualities that are reflected in us. I've heard this said before and I see in Firefly how the mix of characters allows so many people to find something in the characters that they can relate to, admire and connect w

Recently my phone contract expired and I decided to go for something a little different this time. I liked the look of the Palm Treo and also the Nokia e61i. I checked them out on eBay and didn't really find one I liked the price of, so I decided to get one through my phone provider. I've been pleasantly suprised. My current work phone (an iMate JasJam) is a great piece of kit. I venture to say that the e61i is at least as good - if not better. The 802.11 wireless is far better - it works with WPA2 and connects without problems. I have noticed that with a Netgear router it does have occasional problems - but then again, most PCs around the place have problems with that particular router. As a phone it is more than adequate - I like the keypad very much. It has a nice tactile feel to it and I can type reasonably quickly on it. The location of various non-alpha keys confuses me sometimes, but that's to be expected when jumping between different keypads. It has a nice ear piec

I've only recently started playing with eBay. I'd known all about it, but never used, knowing my proclivity for spending. But I have started using it. I thought it would be nice to get my girl a new mobile phone. I thought one of those Nokia N93's would be cool so I tracked one down. And then the stupidity commenced. Picture on item: matches phone. Description: mostly matches phone. Actual item: a CD with crap on it for this type of phone. Bid: $8.33 Shit. Wrong item. The images on the page, the general thread of the description mention in an obtuse way that this is for a CD not a phone. I didn't read it carefully enough and *bang* bid on a piece of crap I'll probably never use. I congratulate the seller - the ad was well crafted and hit the right notes to make it seem like it was a phone I was bidding on. I especially like that in the eBay categories the CD is in the "Mobile Phone" section. Very nice. I'll remember this for the future. I'm just gl

I've spent a fair bit of time around Linux and I was very interested to see what this new distribution had to offer. I went the cheater's path for my work PC (a Dell GX260) and upgraded first to the RC and then patched to the full version. I like it a lot on this machine, it detected my wide screen LCD properly, looks nice and feels like it runs faster than 7.04. So, all good. At home however, the story varies significantly. I have a whitebox with an AMD processor in it, a 250GB SATA disk and standard everything else. It currently runs Windows Vista Ultimate (ugh!) and I had approximately 80GB free that I thought would be handy for Ubuntu. I will note that this particular machine, when I attempted to install OpenSuSE 10.3 on it, appears to have some obscure SATA controller and SuSE was unable to detect it. I was prepared for the eventuality that Ubuntu wouldn't see it either, but to my pleasant surprise it did. I ran the install, popped GRUB on the system and rebooted. Ever

I was reading an article discussing forensic preparation for computer systems. Some of the stuff in there I knew the general theory of, but not the specifics of how to perform. As I thought about it, it occurred to me that Systems Administration is such a vast field. There is no way I can know all of this stuff. I made a list of the software and operating systems I currently manage. They include: - Windows Server 2003, Standard and Enterprise - Exchange 2003 - Windows XP - Windows Vista - Windows 2000 - Ubuntu Linux - OpenSuSE Linux - Mac OSX (10.3 and 10.4) - Solaris 8 - SQL 2005 - Various specialised software for the transport industry I have specific knowledge on some of this, broad knowledge on all of it, and always think "There's so much I *don't* know". It gets a bit down heartening sometimes. For one thing - I have no clue about SQL 2005 and I need to make it work with another bit of software. All complicated and nothing straightforward. Irritating doesn&

I'm not sure how other people really think - I have a degree in Psychology but I'm still not entirely convinced by the ideas on theory of mind. I have a few observations that I'd like to share. For one thing, and this is kind of strange, when there is a problem I need to solve I can't "think" through it. If I try to reason my way through it, my conscious mind wanders off to God knows where and I get nowhere. But if I relax, clear my mind and just allow some internal process to work, all of a sudden the answer appears. This is the gap in the internal monologue to which I refer. This does *not* work with mathematical problems. I have always struggled with those sorts of problems. I refer more to the interpersonal problems or even IT problems of which I encounter on a daily basis. Even the lead up to writing this was only a vaguely conceived idea until I started typing and the right words appear on the screen. I wonder how other people "think" their way

I had intended to publish the previous post last night, but didn't get around to it. I've hit a bit of a snag with the OpenSuSE 10.3 installation and ran out of time last night to fix it. Two things are failing. No.1 the PowerEdge server I have has a dodgy DVD reader in it and won't read the 10.3 DVD properly. I checked the DVD for its integrity and all is well with it. I'll need to put another DVD reader into the machine to get it to install I think. While I'm there I think I'll also replace the noisy fan it has at the rear. I can't hear the disks over it and there is no outward indication of any activity which bothers me. No.2 I tried to install 10.3 on my AMD clone PC last night too. It has a 200GB SATA disk in it (can't remember the exact size) and OpenSuSE failed to detect it. WTF? It's not like I have a unique mainboard - it's a fairly standard ASUS board with nothing special about it. This machine ran Ubuntu there for a while and had no pr

My G4 mac has been sitting idle for some time now complaining of no working hard drive. I of course knew this to be a lie as the disk I put in the system was a good one and I thoroughly scanned and tested it before putting it in my beloved G4. After a fair bit of swearing I booted it holding the Option key down. I probably should note that despite my fairly extensive experience with windows and linux I have preciously little with OSX and with Apples in general. I'm amazed for example how good the BIOS seems to be. I can just plug any old USB DVD into this machine and wee! It detects it and off we go. Very cool. On a similar age PC you'd be lucky to have that kind of functionality available. So at any rate I'm currently typing this on my G4 - it's quite responsive, now it has 868MB of RAM (I know - its a weird number). The reason I'm using this machine and not my equally beloved L400 is just for variety sakes. I have a number of machines available at home. They incl

To continue my previous piece (sorry for the delay) about the installation of Ubuntu 7.04 on a Dell L400. To quickly restate the machine's statistics: P3-700MHz processor, 256MB of RAM and a 20GB HDD. The installation of Ubuntu from the normal disk is a non-happening event. It simply requires too much RAM to boot the graphical interface. So instead, I downloaded the alternate install CD and performed the installation in text mode. Here is a big thing to remember: Boot the kernel with acpi=no. Otherwise you might find the machine getting a lot of "Sleep" messages during the boot and also during the installation. Very *very* frustrating to say the least. It wasn't the fastest installation in the world, but I didn't expect to be the fastest either. It went smoothly and everything was happily detected. Great I thought. It booted OK, it ran the Gnome desktop quite well - although somewhat slowly. I started going through and tidying up the boot stuff and working to mini

It's been a while since I posted anything - I'll plead the pressures of work and social life as my excuse. In the meantime I have picked up a little old Dell L400. This machine is about 1.6KG in weight and has a Pentium III processor running at 700MHz. I've had to put in a 20GB hard disk (that I had lying around) and it came with 256MB of RAM and two batteries. Not bad at all. Initially I installed Win2k on it and was unimpressed by it's performance. I had also tried to get varies different versions of Linux running on it (more on this to follow). I eventually got SuSE 10.2 running happily on it and all was good. Somehow though... I got it into my head to install Windows XP on this machine. I checked the minimum specifications for XP and found them to be well under the spec of this laptop - something like a 300MHz processor and 128MB of RAM or something similar. The initial install went very smoothly. It was also pleasingly fast. I was very happy. I continued to be very

Here's a couple that have just sprung to mind: Never send a cranky/sarcastic email without having walked away from it for at least an hour first. You never know how much trouble you'll get yourself into. Of course, as a general rule - never lose your temper until it's detrimental not to lose it. Always check the send to address - autocomplete can do the strangest things if you're not paying attention (oops!) Write short, but meaningful emails. Remember that sometimes a very terse email can convey dissatisfaction or dislike. Write to your audience. There are a lot of guides out there suggesting you should write very short emails - that's OK if it's a high volume environment. Not OK if it's a low volume environment. Water/Coffee/Coke/Beer + computer = bad. So many combinations that are so nasty in so many ways. Also, try to avoid smoking while computing - it really fouls up your keyboard. And that's all from the brain for this very moment.

I read a fair few reviews about running Linux on the desktop. One of the things that always springs to my attention is people moaning about hardware support. All things considered, I have an opinion about this. My XP Installation at home does not work without significant time spent downloading (after I've installed a driver for the network card) drivers for sound/video/mainboard stuff. I have an ASUS mainboard, nothing fancy or special. It does not work natively with the drivers supplied with XP. It does, however, work just fine with Linux, specifically Ubuntu, but also SuSE. I run Ubuntu on a series of machines, including two Dell GX260's, a GX270, a Dell Server (the name of which escapes me) and various put together machines. I find fewer issues with drivers than I have had with XP. Don't even get me started on Vista. It's hardware support might be better, but you've got to have a *lot* more of everything to get it to work properly. Drivers for my printer - a HP

The internet seems to be a very US centric medium. Most of the news collected appears to be US related. We all know the US is the centre of the known universe (according to them) and I watch with no small sense of amusement as their political system collapses under the weight of incompetence, greed, malice and well, sheer stupidity. There are a lot of calls for impeachment, but while the Senate or Congress or whatever it is stalls and hums and harrs about things, it won't happen. That idiot Pelosi should be enacting the will of the people and making it happen and instead she is saying it's too hard. WTF? As I understand democracy if the people want something to happen, and they have a majority - why isn't something being done about it? In Australia we have a smaller population and while I'm not suggesting our politicians are any brighter than the US ones, at least we lack the resources to bring war to another nation. We just get dragged along by one of our trading part

About a month ago I bought an i-mate JasJam. Partly because I'm a geek, partly to keep myself organised.... well... mostly because I'm a geek. A very nice bit of kit I must say. Problems. Very rarely I need to restart this device to fix up some minor issues. These include: everything being in CAPS problems re-connecting to the GSM network after I've turned it off problems with it closing the calendar (of all things). These have been very rare - only one or two instances of each. Good things. the keyboard is great to use, even with my semi-controlled fingers the wheel on the side is incredibly useful battery life is better than my Motorola V6 Maxx everything works syncs with Outlook easily and quickly I've been quite happy with the phone functions and quite happy with the PDA functions. I'm a bit better organised than I was and I'm finding it incredibly useful to have access to documents/excel spreadsheets while on the go. Adding a 2GB MicroSD card to this device

Just recently I purchased a second hand G4 tower and a G3 iMac. For a while I've been interested in Mac OS X and given I have a background in both Linux and Unix, it seems like the next thing to try out. So to that end I went and found some cheap Macs to have a play on. The G4 tower cost me $34 and the iMac $9 (w00t!). The iMac came with Panther installed on it, the G4 with OS 9. In vain I have tried to get OS X onto the G4 with no success. It just won't boot off the 10.4 CD, even though it can read it. I might have to find a more legitimate copy ( something I was intending to do anyway ). I prefer to try before I buy, which is why I haven't bought OS X yet. The iMac on the otherhand, had an existing installation on it. That's right. Someone's personal data, possibly their work information was still on this machine. And it was password protected which meant - no access to my own computer. Bummer. A bit of Googling later and I had things to try out. None worked. So I